The Many Moods of Marvin Mischnick

Last year I posted a series of photos documenting the meeting of Marvin Mischnick and his future wife Mildena, their courtship, and some of the places they made “passionate, married, love.” Well now I’ve finally gotten around to scanning some more of Marvin’s photos. Most of these photos were taken between 1938 and 1942 when Marvin was in his late teens and early 20s. He later became a studio photographer and his love for photography is very evident. He also occasioned one of the best obituaries I’ve ever read so when you’re done with the photos head over here and check it out. You can see all the photos here. WARNING: Nudes ahead!!

 

I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way (or a Belated Welcome Back)

Hey Folks- If you’re here it’s probably because you remember my old site Square America which I ran from 2005-2011. I took down that site after I was hacked by a Russian porn site (really!) and I had planned a massive, quixotic redesign that would somehow string my entire collection together to tell a story (or least to say something) about American life in the 20th Century along with a second sequence that would say something about the nature of vernacular photography. Needless to say, I abandoned the project and just started posted random stuff on Facebook and later on Instagram.

With this site I’m not really looking to resurrect that project but I hope it’s a bit closer to what I had in mind then than I’m able to do on social media. I’ve been amassing photographs for over 20 years now I’m at a place where it feels somewhere between a collection and an archive (to me anyway! I’m sure real archivists might disagree) and I hope this site can be the best of both worlds; maintaining the surprise and idiosyncrasy you find in collections while still providing the utility of an archive once the entire collection is on-line. It’ll probably be a train wreck but hopefully an enjoyable one.

Speaking of hopefully enjoyable train wrecks, here’s a sequence of photos drawn completely from photos I added to my collection between Nov. 1st and 3rd. I got a bunch of photo in the mail (bought via eBay) and went to a Post Card show on the 2nd and a flea/antique market on the third where I bought lots (and I mean lots!) of photos. This sequence make use of about 1/3 of the photos I got- you can see it here.